Wymer, Ray

ORAL HISTORY OF RAY WYMER
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
April 24, 2012
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is April 24, 2012, and I am at the home of Mr. Ray Wymer here in Oak Ridge. Mr. Wymer, thank you for taking time to talk to us.
MR. WYMER: My pleasure.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let's start at the very beginning. Why don't you tell me a little bit about where you were born and raised, and your family and where you went to school and grew up?
MR. WYMER: Okay. I was born in Colton, Ohio, which is just outside Toledo, on a farm, and they tell me it was on the second floor in a bedroom, and I think there was a doctor in attendance. I'm not sure. I'm probably one of the few people left around who was born on a farm. That was on October 1, 1927.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. WYMER: My father was a farmer. He was farming two farms at night, by tractor light, and working ten hours a day at a factory in Toledo, Toledo Scale Company, but that was in 1927. In 1929, of course the Great Depression hit --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and he was still paying for the farms, and he couldn't, so he lost both the farms and we moved to Toledo, Ohio, where my dad tried to get a job in a factory, but nobody was hiring. So, we spent a little time in Toledo, and then it turns out one of my father's sisters owned a little three-room house out in Trilby, which is about 20 miles outside Toledo, so we moved there rent-free, and I spent my grade school days 1-8 going to Trilby School --
MR. MCDANIEL: Trilby was the name?
MR. WYMER: -- Trilby, and there was no Svengali anywhere.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: Remember the story of Trilby and Svengali. Svengali was the hypnotist, and has his way with Trilby. But anyway, I spent my growing up years there. When I got to be old enough, about ten years old, I would spend every summer working on a truck farm, Brock's Truck Farm, picking --
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what did your dad do while you all were living in Trilby?
MR. WYMER: At that point, my father was on the Works Progress Administration, WPA, along with millions and millions of other people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Do you remember what projects he worked on, or what he was doing?
MR. WYMER: Well, I remember one time he was not too far from Trilby working on a highway building roads, and I was able to take his lunch to him --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. WYMER: -- every day, but they kind of moved around wherever they needed anybody in the general outskirts of Toledo area.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, I worked on this truck farm, picking beans and planting sugar beets, and made a big 10 cents an hour, which was big money during the Depression.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. WYMER: Every summer, the Fourth of July, there'd be a Fourth of July celebration that the volunteer fire department put on. They would have a big fireworks display, and then, the following morning, a couple of my friends and I would go to where the fireworks were and we'd pick the fireworks that didn't go off --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- and take them back to where I lived, and we went into an empty chicken coop and we poured all the fireworks, all the pyrotechnical material onto the floor of the chicken coop. I scooped a little pile of it off to the side, and I was going to let that be a little fountain of fire, but it turned out one of the sparks flew over to the big pile and the entire chicken coop was alive with scintilla of light. You remember Bush's thousand points of light? Well, we had about 10,000 points of light. I lost my eyebrows.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, gosh.
MR. WYMER: So, that was an exciting experience.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, how old were you when this happened?
MR. WYMER: I was about 11 at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: That sounds like something an 11-year-old would do.
MR. WYMER: Yeah, and that's where I first discovered the camera obscura, which is a little lens-less camera that has an infinite depth of focus and it shines onto a wall. There was a hole in the side of the chicken coop, about half an inch in diameter, and the light came in through that and would shine onto the far wall, and it would show the inverted outdoors upside down --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right.
MR. WYMER: -- and I would entertain the neighborhood kids by pretending I could bring these images in, and they didn't have any idea it was just coming in through that hole in the wall.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WYMER: But anyway, I spent a very idyllic childhood in Trilby. It was a wonderful place to grow up and spend your time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you have brothers and sisters?
MR. WYMER: I had one sister who was a couple of years older, who currently lives in Orlando, still alive.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. WYMER: One summer, I guess I was about 10 or 11, we went into Toledo, and I wanted to get a little telescope. So, we went into a pawn shop, and there was a little brass telescope, a 10-power telescope. I had $1.00 in my pocket and the guy wanted $1.50, and finally he just said, "Okay, you can have it for $1.00." So, I took that home, and then at night I would lay out on the front yard and look at the planets.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WYMER: Amazingly, I could see three of the several moons around Jupiter. It was one of the most exciting things that ever happened in my life --
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WYMER: -- you know, being able to see that. But anyway, I grew up in Trilby, and then my parents decided to move into Toledo. That was just about the time of the Second World War, and at that time, my dad was able to get a job mainly a connection with the war --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- as many people did, and then went back to work when the Great Depression was over. So, we moved to Toledo, and I started going to Libbey High School, where I spent my four years, and that was rather unexceptional. I took the academic course. I had a very good friend who took the business course, and so we very much parted ways when we got out of high school.
MR. MCDANIEL: Hold on just a second. I want to make a real quick adjustment, okay?
MR. WYMER: Sure. Okay. So, in the fall of 1944, we were still at war with both Germany and Japan --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- and I wanted to do my part, so I talked my folks into letting me join the Navy at the age of 17. I, to this day, don't know how I talked them into that but, at any rate, they did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: So, I took what was known as the Eddy Test, which qualified me for radar technician training in the Navy. So, I went off to boot camp at Great Lakes, and spent the coldest winter I'd ever spent --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. WYMER: -- in the Chicago area.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: But, before I went, because I had taken this Eddy Test, the recruiter said, "Well, it would be to our advantage and to yours if you finished high school --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- before you went onto active duty," so I said, "Fine."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, that was in the fall of '44, and it wasn't until August of '45 that they called me to active duty, and both Germany and Japan had surrendered --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- in that interval, so I didn't want to be in the Navy. I wanted to help win the war but I didn't want to spend my life in the Navy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, I was in the Navy just one year and I got out, but it was a wonderful thing because I got the GI Bill --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. WYMER: -- and although it was only a year, that was enough for me to sort of eke my way and expand it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- so I started at Toledo University in an academic course. In order to go and in order to stretch out my GI Bill, I was working nights at a plastic factory from midnight to 8:00, and then going to school during the day.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. WYMER: I didn't get a lot of sleep.
MR. MCDANIEL: I guess not.
MR. WYMER: I did that for two years, and then I got married.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, where did you meet your wife?
MR. WYMER: Well, I met my wife on a blind date. A friend of hers was in my English class, and she told my wife, my wife-to-be, she said, "I met this guy that I think you'd like. He's in my English class." So, we had a date, and we certainly did like each other, so it was about a year and a half later that we got married in 1948 --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- and we decided we really couldn't live in Toledo because neither her mother nor mine would leave us alone --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- so we were going to go to California.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right, exactly.
MR. WYMER: We didn't know anything --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and we started out. This was in 1948. I had a 1934 Chevrolet, and I knew it wasn't going to go very far --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- so we had two English bikes, Raleigh 3-speed bikes. We took the front wheels off of those bicycles, put them (the bikes and the wheels) in the back seat, and struck out for California. We were going to go the southern route, so we went down to Kentucky -- Mammoth Cave, Kentucky -- and we slept in the car overnight at Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, got up in the morning, and the car wouldn't start.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, my.
MR. WYMER: The car wouldn't start, and just about that time, a park ranger came along and said, "I'll give you a shove," and so he started pushing us, and I put the car into second gear and let the clutch out, and I think every gear in the gearbox got stripped. So, he heard that noise, and he stopped pushing. He walked up to the window and he said, "I'll give you $25.00 for it."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WYMER: I said, "Sold!"
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. WYMER: Took the money, signed over the title, took the bikes out of the back seat, and we proceeded from Mammoth Cave on those bicycles. We got as far as Memphis.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. WYMER: Oh yeah, and --
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WYMER: -- it was October, and we thought, "Well, it's getting a little cool. We probably can't make it to California before the snow falls --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WYMER: -- so we better winter." So, we said, "We'll winter in Memphis," and I said, "Well, while we're here, I might as well get some more schooling in."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, I went and enrolled in Memphis State, spent two years there taking chemistry, physics, and a few other things --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- English, and my major professor there took a liking to me. He had been at Vanderbilt, and he was able to get me a small scholarship to go to Vanderbilt University graduate school. So, when I graduated from Memphis State, we went off to Nashville, and I got both a master's degree and a Ph.D. in chemistry, physics and radiochemistry at Vanderbilt University.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. Now, the radiochemistry program, my understanding, was fairly new at Vanderbilt --
MR. WYMER: It was brand new.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- brand new at Vanderbilt, wasn't it?
MR. WYMER: Brand new. We used a brand new textbook by Friedlander and Kennedy --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. WYMER: -- just out. In fact, Friedlander was one of the grand old men of radiochemistry --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and we studied from that. My major professor had been a Division Director at Oak Ridge National Laboratory before he became head of the Chemistry Department of Vanderbilt, and --
MR. MCDANIEL: What was his name?
MR. WYMER: -- I'm sorry?
MR. MCDANIEL: What was his name?
MR. WYMER: That was Merlin D. Peterson, Dr. Peterson, and he was an extraordinary man. He had been a Division Director of a division, which, when he left, they broke it up into three divisions because no one person could handle it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: They broke it up into the Reactor Division, the Chemical Technology Division, and I believe the Chemistry Division. It was always understood that I would go to work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. There was never any question about that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. WYMER: So, when I graduated in 1953, I got my master's and Ph.D. both in 1953, and I just showed up for work one day. I never interviewed for a job. I just went to work --
MR. MCDANIEL: Just went to work, huh?
MR. WYMER: -- in the Chem. Tech Division.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, tell me about that. You just showed up and said --
MR. WYMER: They were expecting me, you know?
MR. MCDANIEL: -- oh, right. Right, right.
MR. WYMER: Peterson had paved the way --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and he told them I was coming. Actually, I had been to Oak Ridge National Lab one time previously while I was at Vanderbilt. I was carrying out my research in the old science building on the Vanderbilt campus, down in the basement, and right next to me, across a stone wall, was a group of physicists conducting what they called the Ranger Project, which meant they were measuring the range of neutrons through the air and through solids. To do that, they pulled a neutron source up on a wire out of a big paraffin container that absorbed the neutrons --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and they pulled the neutron source up out so the neutrons would be escaping, and I got wind of that and I said, "I wonder if those neutrons are getting to me?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right, exactly.
MR. WYMER: So, I said, "I'm gonna go over to Oak Ridge National Lab and borrow a neutron counter," --
MR. MCDANIEL: There you go.
MR. WYMER: -- which I did --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, how funny.
MR. WYMER: -- and, sure enough, I was being neutron irradiated.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, my goodness.
MR. WYMER: So, we got those guys in the Physics Department to not carry out their Ranger experiments while I was across the stone wall from them. So, I had been to ORNL once before.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WYMER: But anyway, I showed up. My wife and I drove over -- this was at night -- and the first thing we saw were the lights of K-25. We thought, "This must be Oak Ridge," you know --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- all these lights, but it turned out it wasn't, of course.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: It was K-25.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, we came into Oak Ridge and rented an apartment, what they used to call the old Garden Apartments out on the Turnpike, and started to work, and the first job I had in the Chem. Tech Division was developing a process to separate lithium isotopes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: That involved handling a lot of mercury, because they dissolved the lithium in mercury -- lithium is soluble in mercury --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- and they equilibrated that with a liquid phase, and the lithium isotopes would distribute themselves between the two phases, and then you get an isotope separation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, that project was called the -- it wasn't COLEX. It was the --
MR. WYMER: It was -- I don't really remember the name.
MR. MCDANIEL: Because as I recall --
MR. WYMER: COLEX was the Y-12 process --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- Y-12 was doing the COLEX process, and the Lab was doing another process.
MR. WYMER: Yeah, it was the other process that I was working on.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WYMER: What did we call it?
MR. MCDANIEL: It was something "LEX." It seemed like it was --
MR. WYMER: Yeah, it had an X in it, but I --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- right.
MR. WYMER: -- don't remember. But, at any rate, we worked with mercury, and every Friday we'd go down the hall. There was a little dispensary at the end of one of the corridors. We'd go down there, and their method of deciding whether or not we were getting an overdose of mercury was to have us sign our name under the preceding week's name, and if our signature was getting palsied, then we're getting too much mercury.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? That's how they tested you?
MR. WYMER: That's how they did it in those days.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, my goodness.
MR. WYMER: But I never got palsied, so I never got too much mercury, I don't think. At any rate, that was my first job, and then after that, I got pretty much into the nuclear reactor fuel cycle.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, how long did you work in the lithium isotope separation?
MR. WYMER: I worked in that for about two years, the lithium isotope --
MR. MCDANIEL: And this was mid '50s at this point?
MR. WYMER: -- yeah, this was '53 to about '55, or something like that --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- and then I moved over into the uranium fuel cycle work, from mining and milling. I worked in all aspects of it during my career -- mining and milling, refining uranium ore, doing purification of irradiated fuel, and did a little work on uranium enrichment. So, in the course of my career, I covered all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: But, at any rate, a technician and I helped put together the little solvent extraction column that was sent to the first Geneva Conference. We were pretty proud of that, you know?
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure. Sure.
MR. WYMER: That was early in my career. Anything I did was new --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh sure, exactly.
MR. WYMER: -- was novel.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, this whole field was new. I mean, you know --
MR. WYMER: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- this thing, the whole field was new.
MR. WYMER: It was, and then we got into studying the dissolving of reactor fuels, irradiated fuels. I worked with some little uranium aluminum alloy things about two inches long and an eighth of an inch in diameter, little metal rods, and I would take those down to the old graphite pile, the Graphite Reactor, which has long since been shut down.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: I'd put those in a pneumatic rabbit and fire those into the middle of the Reactor, and then leave them in there for a little while and fire them back out into a stainless steel cup on the end of about a six-foot aluminum rod.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: We'd catch the little irradiated fuel - it was very radioactive --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- into this cup, and then we'd just run like hell down Central Avenue to my lab, with those out in front of us, that cup, go into the lab, open up the hood, dump them into the dissolver solution.
MR. MCDANIEL: How many were in the cup?
MR. WYMER: Usually one at a time --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. WYMER: -- sometimes two --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- but we did that quite a few times.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, that was my initiation into dissolving radioactive simulated reactor fuel.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: After that, I got involved in irradiating the solvent extraction materials that were used to purify uranium compounds that had fission products in them --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and that involved irradiating mixtures of tributyl phosphate and kerosene in a ring of cobalt-60 sources that was down behind the old graphite pile. Well, the graphite pile had uranium rods in it that the reactor operators would push with a stick from the face of the reactor out through the back of the reactor, and they'd go down a chute and they'd go rattling down this chute and fall into a bucket of water --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- behind the reactor. Well, it was back in there that the cobalt-60 ring was that I put my samples in --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. WYMER: -- so that was extremely radioactive.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, of course.
MR. WYMER: So, every time I'd come out of there, I had to sacrifice a suit of khakis, you know, they were --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah.
MR. WYMER: -- they were gone.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: They were contaminated, and then I'd take the razor blade to my hands, you know --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, goodness gracious.
MR. WYMER: -- and get the radioactivity off my fingers --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, my.
MR. WYMER: -- and then take the stuff back, and then we'd send it off to the Chemistry Division for analysis to see what the degradation --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- products were. So, that was part of what I did to learn how to process spent fuel. Then, in 1957, I'd been there four years, there was a consultant from Georgia Tech who came frequently to the lab, and he said, "You know, we'd really like to have you teach at Georgia Tech if you'd like to," and I said, "Well, that sounds interesting. I might give that a shot."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, we moved down to Atlanta, Georgia, my wife and I. At that time, we had a couple of kids. So, I taught for two years, and what I discovered was I didn't like teaching.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. WYMER: So, they were gracious and they let me come back to Oak Ridge National Lab --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and set me up as a special project leader --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- to do sort of innovative work to see if we could come up with something interesting.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure you weren't the first young person who left to do --
MR. WYMER: And then came back, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- something else and came back.
MR. WYMER: No, I'm sure not, although some liked it and stayed.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WYMER: But anyway, I came back and started working with a plasma torch. That plasma torch would produce about 10,000 degrees kelvin, and I was trying to make uranium carbide. I made a little bit. It was never really very successful. But I had an interesting experience then, because I had a technician working for me who had absolutely no aptitude for technician's work, none whatever. To turn on the plasma torch, you had to do three things. You had to push the power button --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- you had to turn on the water to cool the nozzle so it wouldn't melt --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- and you had to turn on a gas cylinder, it was the gas that made the plasma.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: This fellow couldn't do that. He couldn't do that. Just three things. But I just noticed, when we went down to the lunchroom in the basement of the 4500 building at ORNL, that he would be sitting there reading a newspaper. One day, he'd be reading a Dutch newspaper, the next day he'd be reading a French newspaper, a couple days later he might be reading a German newspaper, or Italian.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WYMER: I thought, "My gosh --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- this guy is a savant in languages."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, I went down to the library and talked to the head librarian and said, "I've got this guy working for me. He's absolutely worthless as a technician, but he has this tremendous talent with languages," and I said, "If you'll take him on for six months and try him out, if you like him at the end of six months, you got him, you pay for him. I'll pay him for it for the first six months. Try him out."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: Well, needless to say, he kept him --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and I count that as one of my major successes at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, getting this guy launched in something he could really do.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MR. WYMER: One day, we went out to the parking lot, and I saw this guy standing there looking at his car. He had a flat tire. I said, "Well, it looks like you've got a flat tire," and he said, "Yeah, yeah." I said, "Have you got a spare tire?" "Geez, I don't know." He said, "I don't know."
MR. MCDANIEL: He's one of those --
MR. WYMER: I said, "Well --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- guys, huh?
MR. WYMER: -- let's look in your trunk, shall we?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: Sure enough, there was a tire in the trunk. "Well now, let's change it. Do you know how to change a tire?" "No, I haven't got a clue," so I changed the tire. I kind of think he worked me at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Sure.
MR. WYMER: I'm not sure. But, at any rate, I worked then at ORNL, I became a Section Head eventually, and then, after a while, became Division Director of Chem. Tech Division, where I finished out my career. But at about the time I became Division Director, or a little bit before that, I started working sort of with my left hand, still employed full-time at ORNL --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- with the Department of State in their nuclear nonproliferation activities. So, I did a lot of foreign travel in connection with them, and the Lab allowed me to do it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and they paid my travel and all. They were contributing to the State Department's nuclear nonproliferation activities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WYMER: So, my principal activity there was to go to Taiwan, who people were concerned might be into proliferation. It turned out they never proliferated, but I went over there 22 times --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WYMER: -- in a period of 14 years --
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WYMER: -- and it was a major activity, but I also did some travel to Europe in connection with this nuclear nonproliferation business, and then I had a chance --
MR. MCDANIEL: What year frame was this? What timeframe was this?
MR. WYMER: -- I finished that in about 1998 or so, and had done it for the preceding 14 --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, so -
MR. WYMER: -- years.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- mid '80s, early to mid '80s --
MR. WYMER: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- through the '90s.
MR. WYMER: Yeah --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- and then I did not really care for being a Division Director. I would much sooner be in the laboratory. So, I went to my Associate Lab Director, who was Bob Merriman at the time, and said, "I'd sort of like to get out of this. I've been doing this quite a while. I like science --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and engineering a lot better than I like managing people and projects," but I couldn't get him to turn me loose. It took me a year and almost threatening to --
MR. MCDANIEL: To leave.
MR. WYMER: -- to leave to get him to say, "Okay, I'll replace you with another division director."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, after that, then I spent a year working in a little enclave over at K-25 -- it was a shielded enclave. You could have classified talks, you could send classified e-mails, you could receive all kinds of information in a classified way. That was in a little shielded facility, and every once in a while we'd have to go into a copper-lined room if something was really secret --
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. WYMER: -- when we didn't want anything to get outside, and then, in connection with that, I was given the opportunity to spend a year in Washington, D.C. working with a nonproliferation group for DOE --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- at the building, which was a great thing for my wife because she really got to know Washington, D.C.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: I don't think I ever accomplished a whole lot for them there, but I did a little bit for them, but very slow-moving. The Department of Energy at that time in Washington, D.C. was not in a big hurry to do anything, and the secretarial help would just as soon say, "Can't you do it," as do it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. WYMER: -- themselves, you know? So, I was glad to get back to the Lab.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure.
MR. WYMER: I retired in 1991 --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WYMER: -- at which time I started consulting, and I've been consulting continuously to this day --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- since 1991.
MR. MCDANIEL: Do you consult with the Lab, or do you consult with -
MR. WYMER: A little bit of each. I did a lot of consulting in connection with trying to help clean up the waste tanks. They have 149 high-level waste tanks out at Hanford full of tens of millions of curies of radioactivity --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and I've spent, I suppose, 25 years working out there, and they still haven't emptied a single tank. It's sort of incredible.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WYMER: That's not very fast moving, either. That's a WPA project, like my dad worked on --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MR. WYMER: -- during the Great Depression --
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. WYMER: -- but they're inching ahead now. So, I spent a lot of time on that, and I just this past summer spent a little bit more time out there because there was some concern that some of the sludges in the tanks might have enough plutonium in them that if you transferred it around it would go critical.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. WYMER: I went with about a four-man group. We went out there and took a look at that, and really decided, "No, there's no problem. Go ahead and empty the tanks, why don't you?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MR. WYMER: So, I'm still working there. About five years ago, I got appointed as an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt, so I spend some time over there consulting, and I have a little consulting contract down at the Lab to this day, where we're looking into the possibility of some rogue country trying to get clandestine either fuel reprocessing or enrichment, or some activity that would allow them to get material to make a nuclear weapon xx.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- and so I'm working a little bit out at the Lab on that. I've got a pretty good size contract with the National Nuclear Security Administration.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. WYMER: I got that job in connection with some work I had done with the National Academies. I've been on about ten National Academies studies, and, for about six years, I was on the Nuclear Radiation Studies Group -- board they called it - which that led to the NNSA work, the National Nuclear Security Administration work, which was on molybdenum-99. NNSA is trying to get four companies to produce molybdenum-99 because that's used in medical diagnostics. Molybdenum-99 is a short-lived fission product that has a daughter, technetium-99m, which is even shorter-lived --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- which is used in 80 percent of all the radiochemical diagnostics that are carried out in the world. Eighty percent are carried out using technetium-99m, so you've got to produce the molybdenum-99 --
MR. MCDANIEL: In order to get the technetium.
MR. WYMER: -- in order to get the technetium. So, there are four companies that are funded by NNSA to carry out this work, and I'm on about a four-man review committee that reviews all these four companies, each of whom was using a different approach --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WYMER: -- to produce molybdenum, and I'm doing that. I just finished bits of writing up reports. I've been doing that for about four years now --
MR. MCDANIEL: Have you?
MR. WYMER: -- and that's one of my major activities. I've been on, I still am, on a review group for the fuel reprocessing activities that the Department of Energy has going in trying to develop new methods of reprocessing what they call used fuel. They used to call it spent fuel --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- but now they say, "It isn't totally spent, it's just used. We can still get some more out of it."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: So, you know, a lot of what DOE does is think of clever names. So, I do some of that, and that sort of keeps me out of trouble -
MR. MCDANIEL: Does it?
MR. WYMER: -- and now I'm alone. My wife died about 15 months ago. You know, at 85, she was not exactly carried away in her prime -
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and I've got four kids -
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. WYMER: -- three daughters and a son. One daughter is married to a man retired now who was an orthopedic surgeon, and she lives up in Bristol, and my son, who was the next in line, he's a radiologist with a specialty in nuclear medicine. He's the chief of radiology at the VA hospital in Gainesville, Florida, and also has an assistant professor post at the University of Florida Medical School, and is the past president of the American Nuclear Medicine Society.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: I have another daughter, who lives here in Oak Ridge, whose husband is a CEO and President of a national cleaning firm. He has about 7,000 guys pushing mops for him --
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WYMER: -- all over the United States.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WYMER: Yeah, it's --
MR. MCDANIEL: That's amazing.
MR. WYMER: -- he can have that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: Then, I have a younger daughter who lives in Chattanooga. Her husband is an emergency medicine doctor at one of the hospitals there in Chattanooga, and she teaches at Chattanooga State, a two-year college in Chattanooga. She teaches environmental science -
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. WYMER: -- and then, once a month, she dives at the Chattanooga Aquarium to feed the fish and clean the windows, and wave at the kids --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. WYMER: -- through the glass, and that kind of stuff. So, I'm pretty proud of my family.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure.
MR. WYMER: I've got ten grandchildren and six great-grandchildren --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, my goodness.
MR. WYMER: -- and that just about winds it up.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, let's go back and talk a little bit about -- I want to talk a little bit about some specifics of your work, and then a little bit about your life here in Oak Ridge. Do you have any good stories, any instances through your career in Oak Ridge that really stand out?
MR. WYMER: Well, it all kind of is in that category.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: I guess the most significant thing that I've done, and probably the most interesting, too, is the work I did, what I call left-handed, for the Department of State, actually --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. Yeah, tell me a little bit more about that.
MR. WYMER: -- and this nuclear nonproliferation activity. There was a time when the United States government was encouraging other people to get into fuel reprocessing, a lot of things which were really strictly taboo today.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: But this was right after the Atoms for Peace business and after the two or three Geneva Conferences, and so they were encouraging countries like Taiwan to get into reprocessing, and Taiwan had set up some hot cells, and they were into a little small-scale reprocessing. So, we were over there sort of keeping an eye on them, and then, of course, the worm turned and we said, "Okay, stop. Don't reprocess anymore. This is not a good idea, we don't think anymore," --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right, exactly.
MR. WYMER: -- so then we started making these trips to sort of guide them into other areas.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: So, I think probably the most important work I've done has been not work I did specifically at Oak Ridge, because when I was going to Taiwan back in the early days, there was a lot of concern that the mainland Chinese were going to invade Taiwan. When I first started going there, Taiwan was still under martial law. We had an embassy there, but a couple years after I started going there, because of pressure on the United States from mainland China, we closed our embassy and had sort of a “pseudo”, and, to this day, have a “pseudo embassy” --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- which carries out all the functions an embassy carries out but it's not called an embassy --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- and this was to placate the mainland Chinese, and it did. But as far as Oak Ridge itself, it was interesting that at the time, most of the time I was there, Alvin Weinberg, who was the director of Oak Ridge National Lab for most of that time until Floyd Culler took over, Alvin was -- well, Floyd took over sort of interim.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: Alvin was either pushing the Homogenous Reactor, Aqueous Homogenous Reactor, or the Molten Salt Reactor, and I never worked on either of those.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. WYMER: I was in Chem. Tech, and that's where a lot of this work was going on, and I would pass Weinberg occasionally in the hall, and he would stop and ask me about, "Well, what's going on with the Aqueous Homogeneous Reactor reprocessing?" I didn't know. I was doing the fuel cycle work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: Later on, it was, "How about the Molten Salt Reactor? What's going on, Ray?" I don't know. I found it kind of embarrassing to me, you know, because I was on a totally different area, which Alvin really didn't much care about. He wasn't much interested in the fuel cycle. He was interested in his reactors.
MR. MCDANIEL: What was Weinberg like? I mean -
MR. WYMER: Weinberg was a real visionary. He saw things way out into the future, and was a brilliant man. In some senses, he was too much out in the future, because I remember one time I was at the Knoxville McGhee Tyson Airport, and Weinberg had his coterie of sycophants around him talking to him, and he was talking about how we've got to be careful and guard against what's going to happen in 10,000 years or 100,000 years, and we need to do planning. I said all innocently, "You know, we're gonna have probably several ice ages in between then. If we had them in the past, we're gonna have them in the future, and besides, technology is moving and we really won't know what is gonna happen. We can't possibly plan that far ahead, Alvin." Well, that went over like a lead balloon, you might expect, because Alvin was not interested in hearing somebody say really long-range planning is not a good idea. I would occasionally stay late with Floyd Culler. He and I would just talk about things. Floyd was one of the most gifted people that I ever ran into. He would be expected to give a talk down in the ORNL Central Auditorium, and about an hour in advance, he would go into the -- we had a drafting room at the time. He'd say, "I need these view graphs for my talk," and sort of on the fly, he would put together a brilliant presentation, and when Floyd gave a talk, everybody in the whole Laboratory would crowd into the Central Auditorium because he would say things and he would tell people things that none of the upper management at ORNL would say.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: Floyd would just stand up there and tell it like it was, you know - a remarkable guy. As he got older, after he had retired, he went to EPRI, worked there for a number of years, and then he retired from there and his wife died rather tragically. He moved out to California to live with his son, and he started to get Alzheimer's disease. He would call me up from time to time, out from California, and ask me to look up something for him, or ask me questions, and I'd give him answers that he'd have to have his son take the answers down because he couldn't remember them long enough to do that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, he died rather tragically, but while he was in his prime, he was a world beater --
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. WYMER: -- and if he wanted to know something, out of the 5,000 people at ORNL at that time, he knew a large percentage of them --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and if he wanted to know something, he wouldn't go down the chain of command through the divisions. He'd just call the technician doing the work and say, "Can you answer this question?" It was a pleasure to work with Floyd.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: Later on, we had a series of quite good Laboratory directors. We had a guy named Wadsworth --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- who brought on the computers like gangbusters --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and of course that turned out to be a major contribution to the Lab.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: So, Wadsworth turned out to be quite an asset to the Laboratory while I was still somewhat active there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MR. WYMER: Some of the other leaders, Alvin -- not Alvin, Zucker.
MR. MCDANIEL: Alex?
MR. WYMER: Alex, not Alvin. Alex Zucker worked very hard to get the Materials Science Laboratory, which has turned out to be a major asset for the Lab, so he did a lot of excellent things there. He was kind of an interesting guy, because he would come down and say, "You've got more money in heavy element research in your division than I've got. Give me some of it," you know?
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WYMER: Yeah. Another interesting anecdote, if you're interested in that sort of thing --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- is I got to know Glenn Seaborg a little bit, and it turned out that when he was the Secretary of Energy for quite a few years, and he initiated the heavy element program in the country. He kept a lot of notebooks, and he had kept records. From the time he was a teacher at the University of California, he had kept notes of all of the graduate student seminars, the students that he had, and then he kept notes, exhaustive notes of all the time he was Secretary of Energy, and somehow or other the Department of Energy got wind of that, and they said, "You can't keep those notes. That stuff is classified, for heaven's sake." So, they went to his home. He had all these filing cabinets in his home. They went to his home, and they trucked off all those filing cabinets, and that had happened just shortly before he came to the Lab, and I was taking him out, driving him back to the airport and all he could do was just gripe and complain about the fact that they had stolen his notes, you know?
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, my goodness.
MR. WYMER: So, that was interesting, but he was an interesting guy. He was into fast foods. His idea of a good meal was a great, big hamburger.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. WYMER: The crowning achievement of his life, of his career, was having the element seaborgium named after him, and I used to get phone calls from him saying, "You know, I need a piece of equipment out here, and I understand you've got that piece of equipment in your division. Why don't you just send it out here?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, how funny.
MR. WYMER: So, we would make arrangements through the proper channels to send stuff to him, and I guess some of the most interesting things were some of the people I met. I was sort of a second-generation at the Lab. I was not there at the Manhattan Project, but I started in '53.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: Well, a lot of the old guys that were there in '45, '44, '43 were still very active, and I got to know a lot of them personally, and they were a brilliant bunch of people, Bob Penneman, for example. I think he's still alive at the age of 92. Larry Asprey died at the age of 86 a few years back. He was one of the grand old men of the heavy element field.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: I got to know Lou Keller very well, I still stay in contact with him, who was the Director of the Chemistry Division, and then, later on, the Director of the Heavy Element Research Lab out at ORNL. It might be worth your while sometime to interview Lou.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. WYMER: He's in Atlanta at the moment. He lives with his wife. So, some of the highlights were those, and there were some tragic things. My Division Director for years before I became Division Director was Don Ferguson, who was a brilliant but strange man. He was very ill at ease in social gatherings. But he had enormous insight into people and things, and he worked very closely with Glenn Seaborg and with a guy they used to call the Baron, a gun named Baranowski, who was a DOE man who ran the heavy element program, and much of the DOE production facilities at Savannah River and Hanford laboratories, and the Baron and Don Ferguson were a matched set. They spoke the same language, so Don always was able to see to it that we were well funded in our heavy element business.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: In Chem. Tech, we made the first californium-252 in any quantity, and part of that was done under Don Ferguson and part was done under me, and to this day, the Chem. Tech Division is still involved in the heavy element production program, although when Seaborg passed on, the funding sort of dried up slowly for the heavy element business because nobody really cared except Glenn Seaborg and the few people who were working in the field.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure.
MR. WYMER: So, they're still doing that. So, any other specific questions you'd like to --
MR. MCDANIEL: Let's talk about how you came to Oak -- except for the two years I guess you went to Georgia, you were in Oak Ridge since about '53.
MR. WYMER: Yeah, '53 to '91, with two years out.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly. Exactly, even though you traveled a lot. Well, you raised your family here. What was --
MR. WYMER: Yeah, one of my kids was born while I was going to Memphis State.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WYMER: That was my daughter, and another kid was born while I was at Vanderbilt, living in the veterans' apartments at Vanderbilt --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and another one was born in Atlanta, while I was teaching at Georgia Tech, and another one was born here in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WYMER: So, they're strewn across the South but they're all very much southern people.
MR. MCDANIEL: But they grew up in Oak Ridge, basically?
MR. WYMER: They grew up in Oak Ridge. Most of the grade school was in Oak Ridge, all the High School. The Oak Ridge High School, as you know, is excellent --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- so they were very well prepared to go on to college.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: Pretty much their first year of college was a breeze because they'd had most of it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. WYMER: -- in high school. My son actually used to get up in the morning when he was in high school before anybody else got up, and he'd sit and he'd read his textbooks, as a result of which, when he went to college, he was able to take tests and skip the whole first year --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. WYMER: -- of college by taking proficiency tests. We had promised all four of our kids four years of college, so my son said, "I got out in three years. You owe me a year."
MR. MCDANIEL: There you go.
MR. WYMER: So, we said, "Okay, I'll give you a year." He said, "Well, I'm going to medical school. I'm going to Vanderbilt." I said, "Okay, you've got a year at Vanderbilt." I wasn't going to pay any more for him, he got his four years, so he joined the Army, and then they paid the rest of his medical education, and then he did the payback time --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WYMER: -- when he graduated.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. WYMER: So, the four kids went here, and it was a wonderful place for the kids to grow up, right here among the lakes and the community of people. The circles we moved in were pretty much the professional people, so my kids knew the professional’s people's kids.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: They found that Oak Ridge High School was pretty competitive, because there were a lot of really brilliant kids --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure.
MR. WYMER: -- that they were in competition with.
MR. MCDANIEL: Were you all involved in civic groups or organizations?
MR. WYMER: Well, I was a Boy Scout longer than my son was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. WYMER: When he joined the Boy Scouts, I became an assistant hiking scoutmaster, because my scoutmaster was too heavy to hike, so I was the assistant hiking scoutmaster.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, I took them hiking, and then my son, of course, after a while, he left the Boy Scouts, and I said, "Okay, I want out of the Boy Scouts." They said, "Well, Ray, we can't find anybody to replace you. Will you stay on another year?" That happened for about four years --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. WYMER: -- before I finally said, "I quit!" and then they managed to find somebody. My wife was much more active than I was. She was, on two separate occasions, President of the local League of Women Voters.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. WYMER: She was president in ADFAC and CASA. She was in the Girl Scouts for about ten years, you know, leading various activities. So, she was much more active. I had a pretty active life at the Lab --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right, exactly.
MR. WYMER: -- but she was the one who was the social outreach person in the family.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WYMER: I've got a daughter here in town that’s following in her footsteps, doing the same kinds of things, and so it's been a good life.
MR. MCDANIEL: Good. Is there anything else you want to talk about?
MR. WYMER: I don't think so. That's probably more than enough to bore more people. All this will be interesting to my kids, no doubt --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, of course, of course.
MR. WYMER: -- when they get it.
MR. MCDANIEL: We'll give you a copy for your kids, too, as well.
MR. WYMER: Okay, I appreciate that.
MR. MCDANIEL: That'll be no problem, so we'll be happy to do that.
MR. WYMER: So, maybe we've reached the end of the rope here?
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Well, thank you so much for talking to us.
MR. WYMER: You're certainly welcome.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
***[Editor’s Note: This transcript has been edited at Mr. Wymer’s request]***

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ORAL HISTORY OF RAY WYMER
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
April 24, 2012
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is April 24, 2012, and I am at the home of Mr. Ray Wymer here in Oak Ridge. Mr. Wymer, thank you for taking time to talk to us.
MR. WYMER: My pleasure.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let's start at the very beginning. Why don't you tell me a little bit about where you were born and raised, and your family and where you went to school and grew up?
MR. WYMER: Okay. I was born in Colton, Ohio, which is just outside Toledo, on a farm, and they tell me it was on the second floor in a bedroom, and I think there was a doctor in attendance. I'm not sure. I'm probably one of the few people left around who was born on a farm. That was on October 1, 1927.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. WYMER: My father was a farmer. He was farming two farms at night, by tractor light, and working ten hours a day at a factory in Toledo, Toledo Scale Company, but that was in 1927. In 1929, of course the Great Depression hit --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and he was still paying for the farms, and he couldn't, so he lost both the farms and we moved to Toledo, Ohio, where my dad tried to get a job in a factory, but nobody was hiring. So, we spent a little time in Toledo, and then it turns out one of my father's sisters owned a little three-room house out in Trilby, which is about 20 miles outside Toledo, so we moved there rent-free, and I spent my grade school days 1-8 going to Trilby School --
MR. MCDANIEL: Trilby was the name?
MR. WYMER: -- Trilby, and there was no Svengali anywhere.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: Remember the story of Trilby and Svengali. Svengali was the hypnotist, and has his way with Trilby. But anyway, I spent my growing up years there. When I got to be old enough, about ten years old, I would spend every summer working on a truck farm, Brock's Truck Farm, picking --
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what did your dad do while you all were living in Trilby?
MR. WYMER: At that point, my father was on the Works Progress Administration, WPA, along with millions and millions of other people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Do you remember what projects he worked on, or what he was doing?
MR. WYMER: Well, I remember one time he was not too far from Trilby working on a highway building roads, and I was able to take his lunch to him --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. WYMER: -- every day, but they kind of moved around wherever they needed anybody in the general outskirts of Toledo area.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, I worked on this truck farm, picking beans and planting sugar beets, and made a big 10 cents an hour, which was big money during the Depression.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. WYMER: Every summer, the Fourth of July, there'd be a Fourth of July celebration that the volunteer fire department put on. They would have a big fireworks display, and then, the following morning, a couple of my friends and I would go to where the fireworks were and we'd pick the fireworks that didn't go off --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- and take them back to where I lived, and we went into an empty chicken coop and we poured all the fireworks, all the pyrotechnical material onto the floor of the chicken coop. I scooped a little pile of it off to the side, and I was going to let that be a little fountain of fire, but it turned out one of the sparks flew over to the big pile and the entire chicken coop was alive with scintilla of light. You remember Bush's thousand points of light? Well, we had about 10,000 points of light. I lost my eyebrows.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, gosh.
MR. WYMER: So, that was an exciting experience.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, how old were you when this happened?
MR. WYMER: I was about 11 at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: That sounds like something an 11-year-old would do.
MR. WYMER: Yeah, and that's where I first discovered the camera obscura, which is a little lens-less camera that has an infinite depth of focus and it shines onto a wall. There was a hole in the side of the chicken coop, about half an inch in diameter, and the light came in through that and would shine onto the far wall, and it would show the inverted outdoors upside down --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right.
MR. WYMER: -- and I would entertain the neighborhood kids by pretending I could bring these images in, and they didn't have any idea it was just coming in through that hole in the wall.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WYMER: But anyway, I spent a very idyllic childhood in Trilby. It was a wonderful place to grow up and spend your time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you have brothers and sisters?
MR. WYMER: I had one sister who was a couple of years older, who currently lives in Orlando, still alive.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. WYMER: One summer, I guess I was about 10 or 11, we went into Toledo, and I wanted to get a little telescope. So, we went into a pawn shop, and there was a little brass telescope, a 10-power telescope. I had $1.00 in my pocket and the guy wanted $1.50, and finally he just said, "Okay, you can have it for $1.00." So, I took that home, and then at night I would lay out on the front yard and look at the planets.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WYMER: Amazingly, I could see three of the several moons around Jupiter. It was one of the most exciting things that ever happened in my life --
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WYMER: -- you know, being able to see that. But anyway, I grew up in Trilby, and then my parents decided to move into Toledo. That was just about the time of the Second World War, and at that time, my dad was able to get a job mainly a connection with the war --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- as many people did, and then went back to work when the Great Depression was over. So, we moved to Toledo, and I started going to Libbey High School, where I spent my four years, and that was rather unexceptional. I took the academic course. I had a very good friend who took the business course, and so we very much parted ways when we got out of high school.
MR. MCDANIEL: Hold on just a second. I want to make a real quick adjustment, okay?
MR. WYMER: Sure. Okay. So, in the fall of 1944, we were still at war with both Germany and Japan --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- and I wanted to do my part, so I talked my folks into letting me join the Navy at the age of 17. I, to this day, don't know how I talked them into that but, at any rate, they did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: So, I took what was known as the Eddy Test, which qualified me for radar technician training in the Navy. So, I went off to boot camp at Great Lakes, and spent the coldest winter I'd ever spent --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. WYMER: -- in the Chicago area.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: But, before I went, because I had taken this Eddy Test, the recruiter said, "Well, it would be to our advantage and to yours if you finished high school --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- before you went onto active duty," so I said, "Fine."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, that was in the fall of '44, and it wasn't until August of '45 that they called me to active duty, and both Germany and Japan had surrendered --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- in that interval, so I didn't want to be in the Navy. I wanted to help win the war but I didn't want to spend my life in the Navy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, I was in the Navy just one year and I got out, but it was a wonderful thing because I got the GI Bill --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. WYMER: -- and although it was only a year, that was enough for me to sort of eke my way and expand it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- so I started at Toledo University in an academic course. In order to go and in order to stretch out my GI Bill, I was working nights at a plastic factory from midnight to 8:00, and then going to school during the day.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. WYMER: I didn't get a lot of sleep.
MR. MCDANIEL: I guess not.
MR. WYMER: I did that for two years, and then I got married.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, where did you meet your wife?
MR. WYMER: Well, I met my wife on a blind date. A friend of hers was in my English class, and she told my wife, my wife-to-be, she said, "I met this guy that I think you'd like. He's in my English class." So, we had a date, and we certainly did like each other, so it was about a year and a half later that we got married in 1948 --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- and we decided we really couldn't live in Toledo because neither her mother nor mine would leave us alone --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- so we were going to go to California.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right, exactly.
MR. WYMER: We didn't know anything --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and we started out. This was in 1948. I had a 1934 Chevrolet, and I knew it wasn't going to go very far --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- so we had two English bikes, Raleigh 3-speed bikes. We took the front wheels off of those bicycles, put them (the bikes and the wheels) in the back seat, and struck out for California. We were going to go the southern route, so we went down to Kentucky -- Mammoth Cave, Kentucky -- and we slept in the car overnight at Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, got up in the morning, and the car wouldn't start.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, my.
MR. WYMER: The car wouldn't start, and just about that time, a park ranger came along and said, "I'll give you a shove," and so he started pushing us, and I put the car into second gear and let the clutch out, and I think every gear in the gearbox got stripped. So, he heard that noise, and he stopped pushing. He walked up to the window and he said, "I'll give you $25.00 for it."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WYMER: I said, "Sold!"
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. WYMER: Took the money, signed over the title, took the bikes out of the back seat, and we proceeded from Mammoth Cave on those bicycles. We got as far as Memphis.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. WYMER: Oh yeah, and --
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WYMER: -- it was October, and we thought, "Well, it's getting a little cool. We probably can't make it to California before the snow falls --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WYMER: -- so we better winter." So, we said, "We'll winter in Memphis," and I said, "Well, while we're here, I might as well get some more schooling in."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, I went and enrolled in Memphis State, spent two years there taking chemistry, physics, and a few other things --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- English, and my major professor there took a liking to me. He had been at Vanderbilt, and he was able to get me a small scholarship to go to Vanderbilt University graduate school. So, when I graduated from Memphis State, we went off to Nashville, and I got both a master's degree and a Ph.D. in chemistry, physics and radiochemistry at Vanderbilt University.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. Now, the radiochemistry program, my understanding, was fairly new at Vanderbilt --
MR. WYMER: It was brand new.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- brand new at Vanderbilt, wasn't it?
MR. WYMER: Brand new. We used a brand new textbook by Friedlander and Kennedy --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. WYMER: -- just out. In fact, Friedlander was one of the grand old men of radiochemistry --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and we studied from that. My major professor had been a Division Director at Oak Ridge National Laboratory before he became head of the Chemistry Department of Vanderbilt, and --
MR. MCDANIEL: What was his name?
MR. WYMER: -- I'm sorry?
MR. MCDANIEL: What was his name?
MR. WYMER: That was Merlin D. Peterson, Dr. Peterson, and he was an extraordinary man. He had been a Division Director of a division, which, when he left, they broke it up into three divisions because no one person could handle it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: They broke it up into the Reactor Division, the Chemical Technology Division, and I believe the Chemistry Division. It was always understood that I would go to work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. There was never any question about that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. WYMER: So, when I graduated in 1953, I got my master's and Ph.D. both in 1953, and I just showed up for work one day. I never interviewed for a job. I just went to work --
MR. MCDANIEL: Just went to work, huh?
MR. WYMER: -- in the Chem. Tech Division.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, tell me about that. You just showed up and said --
MR. WYMER: They were expecting me, you know?
MR. MCDANIEL: -- oh, right. Right, right.
MR. WYMER: Peterson had paved the way --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and he told them I was coming. Actually, I had been to Oak Ridge National Lab one time previously while I was at Vanderbilt. I was carrying out my research in the old science building on the Vanderbilt campus, down in the basement, and right next to me, across a stone wall, was a group of physicists conducting what they called the Ranger Project, which meant they were measuring the range of neutrons through the air and through solids. To do that, they pulled a neutron source up on a wire out of a big paraffin container that absorbed the neutrons --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and they pulled the neutron source up out so the neutrons would be escaping, and I got wind of that and I said, "I wonder if those neutrons are getting to me?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right, exactly.
MR. WYMER: So, I said, "I'm gonna go over to Oak Ridge National Lab and borrow a neutron counter," --
MR. MCDANIEL: There you go.
MR. WYMER: -- which I did --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, how funny.
MR. WYMER: -- and, sure enough, I was being neutron irradiated.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, my goodness.
MR. WYMER: So, we got those guys in the Physics Department to not carry out their Ranger experiments while I was across the stone wall from them. So, I had been to ORNL once before.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WYMER: But anyway, I showed up. My wife and I drove over -- this was at night -- and the first thing we saw were the lights of K-25. We thought, "This must be Oak Ridge," you know --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- all these lights, but it turned out it wasn't, of course.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: It was K-25.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, we came into Oak Ridge and rented an apartment, what they used to call the old Garden Apartments out on the Turnpike, and started to work, and the first job I had in the Chem. Tech Division was developing a process to separate lithium isotopes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: That involved handling a lot of mercury, because they dissolved the lithium in mercury -- lithium is soluble in mercury --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- and they equilibrated that with a liquid phase, and the lithium isotopes would distribute themselves between the two phases, and then you get an isotope separation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, that project was called the -- it wasn't COLEX. It was the --
MR. WYMER: It was -- I don't really remember the name.
MR. MCDANIEL: Because as I recall --
MR. WYMER: COLEX was the Y-12 process --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- Y-12 was doing the COLEX process, and the Lab was doing another process.
MR. WYMER: Yeah, it was the other process that I was working on.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WYMER: What did we call it?
MR. MCDANIEL: It was something "LEX." It seemed like it was --
MR. WYMER: Yeah, it had an X in it, but I --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- right.
MR. WYMER: -- don't remember. But, at any rate, we worked with mercury, and every Friday we'd go down the hall. There was a little dispensary at the end of one of the corridors. We'd go down there, and their method of deciding whether or not we were getting an overdose of mercury was to have us sign our name under the preceding week's name, and if our signature was getting palsied, then we're getting too much mercury.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? That's how they tested you?
MR. WYMER: That's how they did it in those days.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, my goodness.
MR. WYMER: But I never got palsied, so I never got too much mercury, I don't think. At any rate, that was my first job, and then after that, I got pretty much into the nuclear reactor fuel cycle.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, how long did you work in the lithium isotope separation?
MR. WYMER: I worked in that for about two years, the lithium isotope --
MR. MCDANIEL: And this was mid '50s at this point?
MR. WYMER: -- yeah, this was '53 to about '55, or something like that --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- and then I moved over into the uranium fuel cycle work, from mining and milling. I worked in all aspects of it during my career -- mining and milling, refining uranium ore, doing purification of irradiated fuel, and did a little work on uranium enrichment. So, in the course of my career, I covered all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: But, at any rate, a technician and I helped put together the little solvent extraction column that was sent to the first Geneva Conference. We were pretty proud of that, you know?
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure. Sure.
MR. WYMER: That was early in my career. Anything I did was new --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh sure, exactly.
MR. WYMER: -- was novel.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, this whole field was new. I mean, you know --
MR. WYMER: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- this thing, the whole field was new.
MR. WYMER: It was, and then we got into studying the dissolving of reactor fuels, irradiated fuels. I worked with some little uranium aluminum alloy things about two inches long and an eighth of an inch in diameter, little metal rods, and I would take those down to the old graphite pile, the Graphite Reactor, which has long since been shut down.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: I'd put those in a pneumatic rabbit and fire those into the middle of the Reactor, and then leave them in there for a little while and fire them back out into a stainless steel cup on the end of about a six-foot aluminum rod.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: We'd catch the little irradiated fuel - it was very radioactive --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- into this cup, and then we'd just run like hell down Central Avenue to my lab, with those out in front of us, that cup, go into the lab, open up the hood, dump them into the dissolver solution.
MR. MCDANIEL: How many were in the cup?
MR. WYMER: Usually one at a time --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. WYMER: -- sometimes two --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- but we did that quite a few times.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, that was my initiation into dissolving radioactive simulated reactor fuel.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: After that, I got involved in irradiating the solvent extraction materials that were used to purify uranium compounds that had fission products in them --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and that involved irradiating mixtures of tributyl phosphate and kerosene in a ring of cobalt-60 sources that was down behind the old graphite pile. Well, the graphite pile had uranium rods in it that the reactor operators would push with a stick from the face of the reactor out through the back of the reactor, and they'd go down a chute and they'd go rattling down this chute and fall into a bucket of water --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- behind the reactor. Well, it was back in there that the cobalt-60 ring was that I put my samples in --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. WYMER: -- so that was extremely radioactive.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, of course.
MR. WYMER: So, every time I'd come out of there, I had to sacrifice a suit of khakis, you know, they were --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah.
MR. WYMER: -- they were gone.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: They were contaminated, and then I'd take the razor blade to my hands, you know --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, goodness gracious.
MR. WYMER: -- and get the radioactivity off my fingers --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, my.
MR. WYMER: -- and then take the stuff back, and then we'd send it off to the Chemistry Division for analysis to see what the degradation --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- products were. So, that was part of what I did to learn how to process spent fuel. Then, in 1957, I'd been there four years, there was a consultant from Georgia Tech who came frequently to the lab, and he said, "You know, we'd really like to have you teach at Georgia Tech if you'd like to," and I said, "Well, that sounds interesting. I might give that a shot."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, we moved down to Atlanta, Georgia, my wife and I. At that time, we had a couple of kids. So, I taught for two years, and what I discovered was I didn't like teaching.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. WYMER: So, they were gracious and they let me come back to Oak Ridge National Lab --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and set me up as a special project leader --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- to do sort of innovative work to see if we could come up with something interesting.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure you weren't the first young person who left to do --
MR. WYMER: And then came back, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- something else and came back.
MR. WYMER: No, I'm sure not, although some liked it and stayed.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WYMER: But anyway, I came back and started working with a plasma torch. That plasma torch would produce about 10,000 degrees kelvin, and I was trying to make uranium carbide. I made a little bit. It was never really very successful. But I had an interesting experience then, because I had a technician working for me who had absolutely no aptitude for technician's work, none whatever. To turn on the plasma torch, you had to do three things. You had to push the power button --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- you had to turn on the water to cool the nozzle so it wouldn't melt --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- and you had to turn on a gas cylinder, it was the gas that made the plasma.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: This fellow couldn't do that. He couldn't do that. Just three things. But I just noticed, when we went down to the lunchroom in the basement of the 4500 building at ORNL, that he would be sitting there reading a newspaper. One day, he'd be reading a Dutch newspaper, the next day he'd be reading a French newspaper, a couple days later he might be reading a German newspaper, or Italian.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WYMER: I thought, "My gosh --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- this guy is a savant in languages."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, I went down to the library and talked to the head librarian and said, "I've got this guy working for me. He's absolutely worthless as a technician, but he has this tremendous talent with languages," and I said, "If you'll take him on for six months and try him out, if you like him at the end of six months, you got him, you pay for him. I'll pay him for it for the first six months. Try him out."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: Well, needless to say, he kept him --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and I count that as one of my major successes at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, getting this guy launched in something he could really do.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MR. WYMER: One day, we went out to the parking lot, and I saw this guy standing there looking at his car. He had a flat tire. I said, "Well, it looks like you've got a flat tire," and he said, "Yeah, yeah." I said, "Have you got a spare tire?" "Geez, I don't know." He said, "I don't know."
MR. MCDANIEL: He's one of those --
MR. WYMER: I said, "Well --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- guys, huh?
MR. WYMER: -- let's look in your trunk, shall we?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: Sure enough, there was a tire in the trunk. "Well now, let's change it. Do you know how to change a tire?" "No, I haven't got a clue," so I changed the tire. I kind of think he worked me at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Sure.
MR. WYMER: I'm not sure. But, at any rate, I worked then at ORNL, I became a Section Head eventually, and then, after a while, became Division Director of Chem. Tech Division, where I finished out my career. But at about the time I became Division Director, or a little bit before that, I started working sort of with my left hand, still employed full-time at ORNL --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- with the Department of State in their nuclear nonproliferation activities. So, I did a lot of foreign travel in connection with them, and the Lab allowed me to do it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and they paid my travel and all. They were contributing to the State Department's nuclear nonproliferation activities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WYMER: So, my principal activity there was to go to Taiwan, who people were concerned might be into proliferation. It turned out they never proliferated, but I went over there 22 times --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WYMER: -- in a period of 14 years --
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WYMER: -- and it was a major activity, but I also did some travel to Europe in connection with this nuclear nonproliferation business, and then I had a chance --
MR. MCDANIEL: What year frame was this? What timeframe was this?
MR. WYMER: -- I finished that in about 1998 or so, and had done it for the preceding 14 --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, so -
MR. WYMER: -- years.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- mid '80s, early to mid '80s --
MR. WYMER: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- through the '90s.
MR. WYMER: Yeah --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- and then I did not really care for being a Division Director. I would much sooner be in the laboratory. So, I went to my Associate Lab Director, who was Bob Merriman at the time, and said, "I'd sort of like to get out of this. I've been doing this quite a while. I like science --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and engineering a lot better than I like managing people and projects," but I couldn't get him to turn me loose. It took me a year and almost threatening to --
MR. MCDANIEL: To leave.
MR. WYMER: -- to leave to get him to say, "Okay, I'll replace you with another division director."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, after that, then I spent a year working in a little enclave over at K-25 -- it was a shielded enclave. You could have classified talks, you could send classified e-mails, you could receive all kinds of information in a classified way. That was in a little shielded facility, and every once in a while we'd have to go into a copper-lined room if something was really secret --
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. WYMER: -- when we didn't want anything to get outside, and then, in connection with that, I was given the opportunity to spend a year in Washington, D.C. working with a nonproliferation group for DOE --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- at the building, which was a great thing for my wife because she really got to know Washington, D.C.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: I don't think I ever accomplished a whole lot for them there, but I did a little bit for them, but very slow-moving. The Department of Energy at that time in Washington, D.C. was not in a big hurry to do anything, and the secretarial help would just as soon say, "Can't you do it," as do it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. WYMER: -- themselves, you know? So, I was glad to get back to the Lab.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure.
MR. WYMER: I retired in 1991 --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WYMER: -- at which time I started consulting, and I've been consulting continuously to this day --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- since 1991.
MR. MCDANIEL: Do you consult with the Lab, or do you consult with -
MR. WYMER: A little bit of each. I did a lot of consulting in connection with trying to help clean up the waste tanks. They have 149 high-level waste tanks out at Hanford full of tens of millions of curies of radioactivity --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and I've spent, I suppose, 25 years working out there, and they still haven't emptied a single tank. It's sort of incredible.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WYMER: That's not very fast moving, either. That's a WPA project, like my dad worked on --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MR. WYMER: -- during the Great Depression --
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. WYMER: -- but they're inching ahead now. So, I spent a lot of time on that, and I just this past summer spent a little bit more time out there because there was some concern that some of the sludges in the tanks might have enough plutonium in them that if you transferred it around it would go critical.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. WYMER: I went with about a four-man group. We went out there and took a look at that, and really decided, "No, there's no problem. Go ahead and empty the tanks, why don't you?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MR. WYMER: So, I'm still working there. About five years ago, I got appointed as an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt, so I spend some time over there consulting, and I have a little consulting contract down at the Lab to this day, where we're looking into the possibility of some rogue country trying to get clandestine either fuel reprocessing or enrichment, or some activity that would allow them to get material to make a nuclear weapon xx.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- and so I'm working a little bit out at the Lab on that. I've got a pretty good size contract with the National Nuclear Security Administration.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. WYMER: I got that job in connection with some work I had done with the National Academies. I've been on about ten National Academies studies, and, for about six years, I was on the Nuclear Radiation Studies Group -- board they called it - which that led to the NNSA work, the National Nuclear Security Administration work, which was on molybdenum-99. NNSA is trying to get four companies to produce molybdenum-99 because that's used in medical diagnostics. Molybdenum-99 is a short-lived fission product that has a daughter, technetium-99m, which is even shorter-lived --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- which is used in 80 percent of all the radiochemical diagnostics that are carried out in the world. Eighty percent are carried out using technetium-99m, so you've got to produce the molybdenum-99 --
MR. MCDANIEL: In order to get the technetium.
MR. WYMER: -- in order to get the technetium. So, there are four companies that are funded by NNSA to carry out this work, and I'm on about a four-man review committee that reviews all these four companies, each of whom was using a different approach --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WYMER: -- to produce molybdenum, and I'm doing that. I just finished bits of writing up reports. I've been doing that for about four years now --
MR. MCDANIEL: Have you?
MR. WYMER: -- and that's one of my major activities. I've been on, I still am, on a review group for the fuel reprocessing activities that the Department of Energy has going in trying to develop new methods of reprocessing what they call used fuel. They used to call it spent fuel --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- but now they say, "It isn't totally spent, it's just used. We can still get some more out of it."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: So, you know, a lot of what DOE does is think of clever names. So, I do some of that, and that sort of keeps me out of trouble -
MR. MCDANIEL: Does it?
MR. WYMER: -- and now I'm alone. My wife died about 15 months ago. You know, at 85, she was not exactly carried away in her prime -
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and I've got four kids -
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. WYMER: -- three daughters and a son. One daughter is married to a man retired now who was an orthopedic surgeon, and she lives up in Bristol, and my son, who was the next in line, he's a radiologist with a specialty in nuclear medicine. He's the chief of radiology at the VA hospital in Gainesville, Florida, and also has an assistant professor post at the University of Florida Medical School, and is the past president of the American Nuclear Medicine Society.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: I have another daughter, who lives here in Oak Ridge, whose husband is a CEO and President of a national cleaning firm. He has about 7,000 guys pushing mops for him --
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WYMER: -- all over the United States.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WYMER: Yeah, it's --
MR. MCDANIEL: That's amazing.
MR. WYMER: -- he can have that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: Then, I have a younger daughter who lives in Chattanooga. Her husband is an emergency medicine doctor at one of the hospitals there in Chattanooga, and she teaches at Chattanooga State, a two-year college in Chattanooga. She teaches environmental science -
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. WYMER: -- and then, once a month, she dives at the Chattanooga Aquarium to feed the fish and clean the windows, and wave at the kids --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. WYMER: -- through the glass, and that kind of stuff. So, I'm pretty proud of my family.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure.
MR. WYMER: I've got ten grandchildren and six great-grandchildren --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, my goodness.
MR. WYMER: -- and that just about winds it up.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, let's go back and talk a little bit about -- I want to talk a little bit about some specifics of your work, and then a little bit about your life here in Oak Ridge. Do you have any good stories, any instances through your career in Oak Ridge that really stand out?
MR. WYMER: Well, it all kind of is in that category.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: I guess the most significant thing that I've done, and probably the most interesting, too, is the work I did, what I call left-handed, for the Department of State, actually --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. Yeah, tell me a little bit more about that.
MR. WYMER: -- and this nuclear nonproliferation activity. There was a time when the United States government was encouraging other people to get into fuel reprocessing, a lot of things which were really strictly taboo today.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: But this was right after the Atoms for Peace business and after the two or three Geneva Conferences, and so they were encouraging countries like Taiwan to get into reprocessing, and Taiwan had set up some hot cells, and they were into a little small-scale reprocessing. So, we were over there sort of keeping an eye on them, and then, of course, the worm turned and we said, "Okay, stop. Don't reprocess anymore. This is not a good idea, we don't think anymore," --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right, exactly.
MR. WYMER: -- so then we started making these trips to sort of guide them into other areas.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: So, I think probably the most important work I've done has been not work I did specifically at Oak Ridge, because when I was going to Taiwan back in the early days, there was a lot of concern that the mainland Chinese were going to invade Taiwan. When I first started going there, Taiwan was still under martial law. We had an embassy there, but a couple years after I started going there, because of pressure on the United States from mainland China, we closed our embassy and had sort of a “pseudo”, and, to this day, have a “pseudo embassy” --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- which carries out all the functions an embassy carries out but it's not called an embassy --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- and this was to placate the mainland Chinese, and it did. But as far as Oak Ridge itself, it was interesting that at the time, most of the time I was there, Alvin Weinberg, who was the director of Oak Ridge National Lab for most of that time until Floyd Culler took over, Alvin was -- well, Floyd took over sort of interim.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: Alvin was either pushing the Homogenous Reactor, Aqueous Homogenous Reactor, or the Molten Salt Reactor, and I never worked on either of those.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. WYMER: I was in Chem. Tech, and that's where a lot of this work was going on, and I would pass Weinberg occasionally in the hall, and he would stop and ask me about, "Well, what's going on with the Aqueous Homogeneous Reactor reprocessing?" I didn't know. I was doing the fuel cycle work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: Later on, it was, "How about the Molten Salt Reactor? What's going on, Ray?" I don't know. I found it kind of embarrassing to me, you know, because I was on a totally different area, which Alvin really didn't much care about. He wasn't much interested in the fuel cycle. He was interested in his reactors.
MR. MCDANIEL: What was Weinberg like? I mean -
MR. WYMER: Weinberg was a real visionary. He saw things way out into the future, and was a brilliant man. In some senses, he was too much out in the future, because I remember one time I was at the Knoxville McGhee Tyson Airport, and Weinberg had his coterie of sycophants around him talking to him, and he was talking about how we've got to be careful and guard against what's going to happen in 10,000 years or 100,000 years, and we need to do planning. I said all innocently, "You know, we're gonna have probably several ice ages in between then. If we had them in the past, we're gonna have them in the future, and besides, technology is moving and we really won't know what is gonna happen. We can't possibly plan that far ahead, Alvin." Well, that went over like a lead balloon, you might expect, because Alvin was not interested in hearing somebody say really long-range planning is not a good idea. I would occasionally stay late with Floyd Culler. He and I would just talk about things. Floyd was one of the most gifted people that I ever ran into. He would be expected to give a talk down in the ORNL Central Auditorium, and about an hour in advance, he would go into the -- we had a drafting room at the time. He'd say, "I need these view graphs for my talk," and sort of on the fly, he would put together a brilliant presentation, and when Floyd gave a talk, everybody in the whole Laboratory would crowd into the Central Auditorium because he would say things and he would tell people things that none of the upper management at ORNL would say.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: Floyd would just stand up there and tell it like it was, you know - a remarkable guy. As he got older, after he had retired, he went to EPRI, worked there for a number of years, and then he retired from there and his wife died rather tragically. He moved out to California to live with his son, and he started to get Alzheimer's disease. He would call me up from time to time, out from California, and ask me to look up something for him, or ask me questions, and I'd give him answers that he'd have to have his son take the answers down because he couldn't remember them long enough to do that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, he died rather tragically, but while he was in his prime, he was a world beater --
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. WYMER: -- and if he wanted to know something, out of the 5,000 people at ORNL at that time, he knew a large percentage of them --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and if he wanted to know something, he wouldn't go down the chain of command through the divisions. He'd just call the technician doing the work and say, "Can you answer this question?" It was a pleasure to work with Floyd.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: Later on, we had a series of quite good Laboratory directors. We had a guy named Wadsworth --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: -- who brought on the computers like gangbusters --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and of course that turned out to be a major contribution to the Lab.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WYMER: So, Wadsworth turned out to be quite an asset to the Laboratory while I was still somewhat active there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MR. WYMER: Some of the other leaders, Alvin -- not Alvin, Zucker.
MR. MCDANIEL: Alex?
MR. WYMER: Alex, not Alvin. Alex Zucker worked very hard to get the Materials Science Laboratory, which has turned out to be a major asset for the Lab, so he did a lot of excellent things there. He was kind of an interesting guy, because he would come down and say, "You've got more money in heavy element research in your division than I've got. Give me some of it," you know?
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WYMER: Yeah. Another interesting anecdote, if you're interested in that sort of thing --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- is I got to know Glenn Seaborg a little bit, and it turned out that when he was the Secretary of Energy for quite a few years, and he initiated the heavy element program in the country. He kept a lot of notebooks, and he had kept records. From the time he was a teacher at the University of California, he had kept notes of all of the graduate student seminars, the students that he had, and then he kept notes, exhaustive notes of all the time he was Secretary of Energy, and somehow or other the Department of Energy got wind of that, and they said, "You can't keep those notes. That stuff is classified, for heaven's sake." So, they went to his home. He had all these filing cabinets in his home. They went to his home, and they trucked off all those filing cabinets, and that had happened just shortly before he came to the Lab, and I was taking him out, driving him back to the airport and all he could do was just gripe and complain about the fact that they had stolen his notes, you know?
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, my goodness.
MR. WYMER: So, that was interesting, but he was an interesting guy. He was into fast foods. His idea of a good meal was a great, big hamburger.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. WYMER: The crowning achievement of his life, of his career, was having the element seaborgium named after him, and I used to get phone calls from him saying, "You know, I need a piece of equipment out here, and I understand you've got that piece of equipment in your division. Why don't you just send it out here?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, how funny.
MR. WYMER: So, we would make arrangements through the proper channels to send stuff to him, and I guess some of the most interesting things were some of the people I met. I was sort of a second-generation at the Lab. I was not there at the Manhattan Project, but I started in '53.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: Well, a lot of the old guys that were there in '45, '44, '43 were still very active, and I got to know a lot of them personally, and they were a brilliant bunch of people, Bob Penneman, for example. I think he's still alive at the age of 92. Larry Asprey died at the age of 86 a few years back. He was one of the grand old men of the heavy element field.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: I got to know Lou Keller very well, I still stay in contact with him, who was the Director of the Chemistry Division, and then, later on, the Director of the Heavy Element Research Lab out at ORNL. It might be worth your while sometime to interview Lou.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. WYMER: He's in Atlanta at the moment. He lives with his wife. So, some of the highlights were those, and there were some tragic things. My Division Director for years before I became Division Director was Don Ferguson, who was a brilliant but strange man. He was very ill at ease in social gatherings. But he had enormous insight into people and things, and he worked very closely with Glenn Seaborg and with a guy they used to call the Baron, a gun named Baranowski, who was a DOE man who ran the heavy element program, and much of the DOE production facilities at Savannah River and Hanford laboratories, and the Baron and Don Ferguson were a matched set. They spoke the same language, so Don always was able to see to it that we were well funded in our heavy element business.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: In Chem. Tech, we made the first californium-252 in any quantity, and part of that was done under Don Ferguson and part was done under me, and to this day, the Chem. Tech Division is still involved in the heavy element production program, although when Seaborg passed on, the funding sort of dried up slowly for the heavy element business because nobody really cared except Glenn Seaborg and the few people who were working in the field.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure.
MR. WYMER: So, they're still doing that. So, any other specific questions you'd like to --
MR. MCDANIEL: Let's talk about how you came to Oak -- except for the two years I guess you went to Georgia, you were in Oak Ridge since about '53.
MR. WYMER: Yeah, '53 to '91, with two years out.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly. Exactly, even though you traveled a lot. Well, you raised your family here. What was --
MR. WYMER: Yeah, one of my kids was born while I was going to Memphis State.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WYMER: That was my daughter, and another kid was born while I was at Vanderbilt, living in the veterans' apartments at Vanderbilt --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- and another one was born in Atlanta, while I was teaching at Georgia Tech, and another one was born here in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WYMER: So, they're strewn across the South but they're all very much southern people.
MR. MCDANIEL: But they grew up in Oak Ridge, basically?
MR. WYMER: They grew up in Oak Ridge. Most of the grade school was in Oak Ridge, all the High School. The Oak Ridge High School, as you know, is excellent --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: -- so they were very well prepared to go on to college.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: Pretty much their first year of college was a breeze because they'd had most of it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. WYMER: -- in high school. My son actually used to get up in the morning when he was in high school before anybody else got up, and he'd sit and he'd read his textbooks, as a result of which, when he went to college, he was able to take tests and skip the whole first year --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. WYMER: -- of college by taking proficiency tests. We had promised all four of our kids four years of college, so my son said, "I got out in three years. You owe me a year."
MR. MCDANIEL: There you go.
MR. WYMER: So, we said, "Okay, I'll give you a year." He said, "Well, I'm going to medical school. I'm going to Vanderbilt." I said, "Okay, you've got a year at Vanderbilt." I wasn't going to pay any more for him, he got his four years, so he joined the Army, and then they paid the rest of his medical education, and then he did the payback time --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WYMER: -- when he graduated.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. WYMER: So, the four kids went here, and it was a wonderful place for the kids to grow up, right here among the lakes and the community of people. The circles we moved in were pretty much the professional people, so my kids knew the professional’s people's kids.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: They found that Oak Ridge High School was pretty competitive, because there were a lot of really brilliant kids --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure.
MR. WYMER: -- that they were in competition with.
MR. MCDANIEL: Were you all involved in civic groups or organizations?
MR. WYMER: Well, I was a Boy Scout longer than my son was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. WYMER: When he joined the Boy Scouts, I became an assistant hiking scoutmaster, because my scoutmaster was too heavy to hike, so I was the assistant hiking scoutmaster.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WYMER: So, I took them hiking, and then my son, of course, after a while, he left the Boy Scouts, and I said, "Okay, I want out of the Boy Scouts." They said, "Well, Ray, we can't find anybody to replace you. Will you stay on another year?" That happened for about four years --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. WYMER: -- before I finally said, "I quit!" and then they managed to find somebody. My wife was much more active than I was. She was, on two separate occasions, President of the local League of Women Voters.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. WYMER: She was president in ADFAC and CASA. She was in the Girl Scouts for about ten years, you know, leading various activities. So, she was much more active. I had a pretty active life at the Lab --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right, exactly.
MR. WYMER: -- but she was the one who was the social outreach person in the family.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WYMER: I've got a daughter here in town that’s following in her footsteps, doing the same kinds of things, and so it's been a good life.
MR. MCDANIEL: Good. Is there anything else you want to talk about?
MR. WYMER: I don't think so. That's probably more than enough to bore more people. All this will be interesting to my kids, no doubt --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, of course, of course.
MR. WYMER: -- when they get it.
MR. MCDANIEL: We'll give you a copy for your kids, too, as well.
MR. WYMER: Okay, I appreciate that.
MR. MCDANIEL: That'll be no problem, so we'll be happy to do that.
MR. WYMER: So, maybe we've reached the end of the rope here?
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Well, thank you so much for talking to us.
MR. WYMER: You're certainly welcome.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
***[Editor’s Note: This transcript has been edited at Mr. Wymer’s request]***